Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Bought an APC power conditioner; help please.

Thanks for the explanation. I figured I'd have a dedicated circuit on each wall just in case I change the orientation of my theater at some point. I think I'm pretty set in how I want it, but I have reconsidered things in the past.

Way to think ahead.

Cam, I have never seen my system pull any more than 6Amps(as seen on the Belkin PF60) even when cranking it up and that included my PB13U, but you do have the RPA1 which would add a couple more amps to the draw. I think you are OK to run as much as you want through the APC, if it trips then you know you need to adjust something, most likely the RPA would need to be plugged nto it's own outlet.

One of the main thing is always to make sure all your equipment is not turned on at the exact same time. That is typically OK if you turn them on manually or through a universal remote. But if you use a "master power control" on a power bar, all these devices starting at once can overpower a breaker.

The only thing enabled by the "Master Power Control" is the ep500 and cinema quest light. This makes it so that my ep500 amp isn't on at all times and I don't have to get up to flip on my bias light behind the TV

Thank you very much everyone for the help.

Just one more question-seeing that the APC will trip at 15 amps, allowing an extra 5 amps of dedicated power to say the second plug of the outlet, do you think that 5 amps would be sufficient for my RPA-1? Just thinking ahead in case I run into any problems.

I don't think that It would limit the second plug to 5 amps.

5 Amps at 120 Volts is 600 Watts. The only problem is the APC may draw up to 12 Amps when re-charging its batteries after an outage. I've seen that happen at work. Plug two UPSes into one breaker, all the equipment behind them presents less than 15 Amps of load, but after an outage both UPSes end up pulling 12 Amps to recharge and the breaker trips.

But as long as you're not playing at max volume right after the power comes back on, you should have enough power to spare.

Regarding the plugging of high draw devices into a power conditioner. It's not the conditioner which breaks. After a large inrush, for some reason they often over volt into the device, and either trip it's protection (blow the fuses in a sub or amp), or take out their power supply. I don't recommend you try it unless you know for a fact that the conditioner is well designed to handle high draw.

Hmmm... so you don't suggest I plug my components into the APC unit referenced in my above post?

I thought you were not using the conditioning port, just the switched one. As long as you don't use the battery backed port, and only the surge suppression it'll be OK.